Dale McFeatters: Confessions of a federal bootlegger

Now that the statute of limitations has surely passed, I can confess that some years back, while an employee of the U.S. government, I was briefly in the moonshine business.

It was in Malawi, in the early days of the Peace Corps. One of my students said he was unable to pay his school fees, but if I would lend him the equivalent of $15, his older sister, apparently a distiller of considerable local renown, could acquire a new still and churn out enough (ital) kachasu (end ital), the local white lightning, to reward her, repay me and cover his tuition.

Soon — apparently aging the product was considered superfluous — he showed up at our door with the money and a Coke bottle plugged with a corncob, a sample of his sister’s skills. I, of course, sampled it. The sensation was akin, I imagine, to a cross between electrocution and having nails driven into one’s skull. And that was the end of my bootlegging days.

As so often seems to happen, I was just too far ahead of the curve. What I had funded was, in today’s parlance, a “microdistillery” and the product was not “popskull” but “boutique moonshine.” Producing limited quantities of artisanal booze is now legal in many states. The Raleigh News & Observer reports that the nation is now home to more than 400 microdistilleries, up from about 150 three years ago.

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I’m not sure when this trend became respectable, but a good bet might be 2007. That was when the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association opened a reconstruction of George Washington’s distillery with a license from the state of Virginia to produce 5,000 gallons of the Founding Father’s whiskey annually.

President Washington suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion in Western Pennsylvania, an early example of a well-connected business using government to crush the competition.

Microdistilling, now that it’s recovered from its brush with big government, will have inevitable social consequences.

There will be a line of Waterford-crystal Mason jars. Real-estate agents showing McMansions will point out the pool house, the gazebo and, back up in the evergreens, the still. Brooks Brothers will offer a line of bib overalls for tending that still. If Thomas Kinkade were still alive, he would do a painting of a snug little whiskey still at twilight.

Clearly there will have to be a remake of the 1958 cult moonshine-running classic, “Thunder Road,” with Justin Bieber in the role played by Robert Mitchum and Honey Boo Boo as the saloon singer memorably played by Keely Smith. The part of the souped-up ‘57 Ford will be played by a Chevy Volt.

The Peace Corps in its early days was inordinately conscious of its image and I worried — not much or for very long, mind you — that a supermarket tabloid might somehow find out what I was up to and there would be a career-ending story to the effect, “Peace Corps volunteer caught bankrolling illegal moonshine operation.”

The explanation that, nearly a half-century on, this would not only have been legal but socially cutting edge — a financier of a boutique distillery, so to speak — would not have had much traction with the Peace Corps hierarchy.

The golden haze of nostalgia, however, can only rewrite so much history. The stuff still tasted awful.